In the debate about continued use of nuclear energy in Japan, I do not understand the demand to abandon nuclear energy unless industry and government can "prove to us that they are 100 percent confident that the plants are safe and that accidents such as those that occurred at Fukushima after March 11 will never happen again," as Kristin Newton writes in her June 16 letter, "Proving one's nuclear confidence." If one refuses life choices without a foolproof guarantee of safety, then how can one live? Life is risky, all the time, and eventually every one of us will die. Failing a reliable safety guarantee, the next option is to define and pursue a reasonable degree of safety. That definition and pursuit ought to frame the debate, not a mawkish appeal to our or our children's safety.
Demanding 100 percent safety is a fetish of the petulant and disgruntled who want to press their point in a time of crisis. It contravenes the definition of right reason.
Sometimes they have a good point, and sometimes they don't. But the demand doesn't get us anywhere. Getting out of bed in the morning is dangerous. You start your day and you don't know how it will end. Accidents happen. That's why they're called that.
For the record, the nuclear industry is statistically safer than any other kind of commercial power production. We don't need accidents like Fukushima, Chernobyl or Three Mile Island to tell us that nuclear power is dangerous.
We know it's dangerous, and that excessive safety claims are mere rhetoric to help us live with ourselves.
Driving a car or flying in a commercial carrier are more dangerous (they kill or maim more people) than the nuclear industry, but we do not abandon them every time there is a highway accident or airline incident. But I could be wrong.
The opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect the policies of The Japan Times.
I am not a conservative.
ReplyDeleteGrant
In addition, neither nuclear power nor nuclear saftey are the point of my letter. Instead, my point is to critique the invention of daily impediments to active living, which people are not only prone to do, but apt to do, repeatedly and without due thought.
ReplyDeleteAnd, the last time I checked the population of the U.S. was 311 million plus a few.
And I am still not conservative. You would know better if you actually knew me.
Grant
Thursday, June 23, 2001.
ReplyDeleteCongratualations. Despite being a little off the point the Japan Times printed your letter. I have already saved it for the file.
If you think the JT is conservative and censoring and it's hard to get a letter printed there you ought to try the Daily Yomiuri!
Grant
Thank you for your post and I appreciate it a lot. Yes I am glad J.T. did post my opine because, your opinion, though your own, gives little credence to the fact that what may have been an accident in your perspective and maybe now a part of life that Japanese folks in Japan must learn to adapt to, is ours too on the U.S. west coast.
ReplyDeleteWhy?
Like I have mentioned, the warning signs were up back in 1973, and minus a few protesters including the ones from Japan, it was nil. Was there malice and forethought on part of the employers of TEPCO? I don't know and in the court of law, I cannot prove intent. But for argument sake, suffice to say that Japan in every level of leadership, from the government to the corporations, gross negligence is definitely present and now our land, my country is becoming contaminated. And to make matters worse, TEPCO's and Japan's silence is deafening...which leads to believe that capitalism oversteps the rights of the Japanese as well as the U.S. affecting our well being for a quick buck...or yen.
Why must we has U.S. citizens gaman or succumb to shikata ga nai? Why must we accept the fact that we must learn to live with this Hell when we choose not to and by default, must? I wanted nothing to do with the disaster nor did I personally want my country destroyed. Grant, you may as well as the more than 120 million may accept this, but why must we?
Because it was an accident? That has got to be the most lame excuse the government and the CEO of TEPCO want the people of Japan to do. Not here in the U.S. I don't want to die from cancer as the result of Japan's greed, but now I must. We must. And to say:
//We know it's dangerous, and that excessive safety claims are mere rhetoric to help us live with ourselves.
Driving a car or flying in a commercial carrier are more dangerous (they kill or maim more people) than the nuclear industry, but we do not abandon them every time there is a highway accident or airline incident. But I could be wrong.//
Is wrong and yes, you are wrong. At least in a car accident, the destruction is localized. Crony capitalism and this nuclear disaster goes beyond the localization we as the people of the world must endure. So yes, I have to disagree with you and hope that the Japanese can some how clean up this mess...and not allow anymore of TEPCO's greed to spread around the world.
Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI habitually write “But I could be wrong,” or “Or not” at the ends of my letters. Sometimes the newspaper prints these disclaimers. Other times, not. The point is to distance me personally from the propositions I am fielding so that any opponents may attack the propositions, not me. One’s personal ideas and beliefs do not matter so much as the quality of one’s suggestions and the eloquence with which one describes them.
That being said, when you say that I am wrong I guess what you mean to say is that my position is wrong.
As long ago as 1995 the International Atomic Energy Commission and the Japanese Prime Minister’s Office received letters from me pointing out and complaining about the industry’s shortcomings, oversights, corruption, faulty assumptions, etc. And I am not the only one, of course. And having said that, I can add that the industry’s and the government’s handling of the current crises here are in keeping with traditional Japanese cultural values and behavior. So referring to a 1973 report on the industry only adds attention to a secret held by hundreds of millions of people already, over quite a long time. The Japanese are great muddlers, and they excel at muddling through, which is exactly what they are currently doing.
But we must live with ourselves in society, and that calls for polite fictions. Many of them. The American polite fiction of freedom. The Japanese polite fiction of homogeneity, etc. We get into a lot of trouble when our polite fictions become so untenable that they clash violently with external reality, which occasionally happens.
So I think we need not worry so much about TEPCO’s crony capitalism and greed, or that of the Japanese government and its near-adulterous relationship with industry so much as we need to worry about the threat of America to the world. Oh, we ought to be concerned with the greed and crony capitalism here, which is a different matter from worrying about it. But those pale to the malice that can be said to breed in America, which can reasonably, although not infallibly be described as the most dangerous country in the world, for many reasons on many levels. Alarm and fear seem to be a particularly American fetish. Alarm and fear are good for business because they motivate people to spend.
Or not.
Grant
Right or wrong Grant, why must our country live under the mistake, as you put it in your story, the blunder and premeditation TEPCO created?
ReplyDeleteTEPCO razed a hill to build Fukushima on low ground
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/07/tepco-razed-a-hill-to-build-fu.html
TEPCO, assuming tsunami 3.1 metres or higher would never hit the coast, cut down the bluff by some 25 metres and erected the plant on artificially prepared ground only 10 metres above sea level... TEPCO further dug below the surface 14 metres more to create underground floors, including those for the turbine buildings, where the emergency diesel generators were installed. The tsunami easily flooded the premises and knocked out the power systems, including those for running the critical reactor core coolant equipment. The meltdowns became inevitable.
Are you still calling this a mistake? I'm going to try my attempt at metics, because, I want to accomodate you as much as possible. It's coming from this sentence.
Water weighs about 8 pounds (3.62873896 kilograms) per gallon (3.785 liters). The ocean has 326 million trillion gallons(1,260,000,000,000,000,000,000 liters(http://tinyurl.com/4w4fzel)) of water. So at 8 pounds and say, arguably, billions of gallons (4,5359,2370 kilo) of water bombarded the nuke's safety wall several times. Which of the two will give in? The wall? Had TEPCO listened to their scientists, this probably wopuld not have happened and now TEPCO is contaminating our country (http://tinyurl.com/3ddgw2m).
Next question, will TEPCO compensate the farmers, the air we breathe, the food we eat after their premeditation in the exercise in crony capitalism? I doubt it and with the overturning of class action lawsuits by SCOTUS from their decision on the Wal-Mart case, it seems that TEPCO will have little or no regards to the people here.
Grant, call it what you like, but I nor 300+ million U.S. citizens did NOT expect radiation from YOUR country to contaminate OUR country, but I guess we should have, because, TEPCO, much to the chagrin of three scientists, TEPCO managed to destroy our economy while making million if not billions in profit, while we get sick. Accident? Yes after the fact, there was no intent, but prior to 3/11? I'd say premeditation. Would you agree?
I think this topic is long passed the threshold of boring.
ReplyDeleteGP
So says you, but boredom is the death-knell of truth. Read the last letter I sent. But my concern is based upon Japan's contamination of the U.S. and there is no way to receive reparations from Japan. So if the people of Japan are bored, then General Electric, Hitachi, TEPCO and every private corporation has won. What did they win? The fact that they can do as they please and pay a small fine...you know, the cost of doing business.
ReplyDeleteSunday, August 21, 2011.
ReplyDeleteI'm bored because you are off topic and wandering and there's no hope of progress on the issue. You like to wander.
Well then, the issue is more or less done. My last post in Japan Times was to a person who mimicked your post.
ReplyDeletehttp://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/rc20110811a3.html
Thursday, Aug. 11, 2011
READERS IN COUNCIL
Evidence on the health effects
By T. MAMORU HANAMI
Montebello, California
In his Aug. 4 letter, Scott Hards wrote that "we simply don't have any hard evidence as to the health effects of small doses of radiation over the long term. All the 'experts' claiming that cancer risk goes up by a certain percentage if you absorb so much radiation are basing their conclusions on statistical models."
Hards and a good portion of the people living in Japan have now become the statistical model, enabling the accumulation of hard evidence on the health effects of small doses of radiation. We on the outside will watch and wait, and study the results of the radioactive emissions in the northeastern part of Japan.
like you, there is noting one can do. Scott Hands went one step further and said,
"we simply don't have any hard evidence as to the health effects of small doses of radiation over the long term. All the 'experts' claiming that cancer risk goes up by a certain percentage if you absorb so much radiation are basing their conclusions on statistical models."
While I aptly responded:
"...the people living in Japan have now become the statistical model, enabling the accumulation of hard evidence on the health effects of small doses of radiation."
As cruel as it may sound Grant, you and yourfriends and relatives in Japan are the guinea pig for President Barack Obama's Jobs consultant Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric. In case you didn't know, we have no records of the effects of either short or long term exposure of radiation be it high or low. But we do have records of G.E. saying they have no records of the health effects due to exposure to radiation...courtesy of the hacktivist group Anonymous Oh and there are 500 Anonymous hacktivists in Japan, as we speak, and they are upset with TEPCO, Hitachi and G.E.
Ever heard of the word kataki? I'm sure you have. Good luck out there Grant, and I apologize a U.S. corporation is willing to sacrifice Japan. Keep in mind though, there are people from the State who do give a damn and are willing to overthrow our corporate tyrants...ask Anonymous